To pen a short piece about one of the most vital topics in the world may well be the height of foolishness. Not only have countless millions of words been uttered and written about love, but I certainly do not think of myself as anyone who really knows much of anything about love.
So why even bother to pen a piece like this? Well, love not only makes the world go around, but it is at the heart of the God we serve – rightly understood that is. The sad reality is there are too many defective and simply unbiblical notions of love out there. And too many Christians can hold to these subpar views of what the love of God really entails.
Here then is a very small sampling of quotes that can help us as we seek to get a biblical understanding of love and correct some faulty notions about it. I mainly feature some of my favourite authors as I present these dozen quotes.
Harry Blamires
“A curse of contemporary Christendom has been the replacement of traditional theology by a new system which we may call Twentieth-century Sentimental Theology. Sentimental theology has invented a God: it insists that he is a God of love, and implies that it is therefore his eternal concern that a thumping good time should be had by all…. So runs the Sentimental Creed. Because this God loves all men equally, therefore we must live in agreement with all men, smiling indulgently upon every vanity and betrayal. Because this God is a God of Love, we must never differentiate between good and evil, for judgment partakes of uncharity and presumption. Because this God is a God of mercy, we must pretend that sins have not been committed, that evils under our own noses do not exist.” A God Who Acts
D. A. Carson
“One passage talks of God’s love in one way; another passage talks of God’s love in another way. But there is more. The Bible talks of God’s wrath. If the Bible talked only about the love of God, carefully delineating different ways of speaking of that love, but never spoke of God’s hatred or his wrath, we would be dealing with a quite different God. Just as we are called to imitate God’s love in various ways, so are we called to imitate God’s wrath and hatred in various ways. And in this passage, the Ephesians are commended for hating the practices of the Nicolaitans, which the exalted Jesus also hates. If contemporary Christians ask themselves how much of their love reflects the love of God in its various dimensions, they should also ask themselves how much of their hatred reflects the hatred of God. Just as we can prostitute love, so we can prostitute hatred.” Love in Hard Places
Elisabeth Elliot
“It is Christ who is to be exalted, not our feelings. We will know Him by obedience, not by emotions. Our love will be shown by obedience, not by how good we feel about God at a given moment. And love means following the commands of God. ‘Do you love Me?’ Jesus asked Peter. ‘Feed My lambs.’ He was not asking, ‘How do you feel about Me?’ for love is not a feeling. He was asking for action.” Discipline: The Glad Surrender
C. S. Lewis
“Love is something more stern than mere kindness. . . . There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and where kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled; the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms; with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.” TheProblem of Pain
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“The false prophet very rarely tells you anything about the holiness, the righteousness, the justice, and the wrath of God. He always preaches about the love of God, but those other things he does not mention. He never makes anyone tremble as he thinks of this holy and august Being with whom we all have to do. He does not say that he does not believe these truths. No; that is not the difficulty. The difficulty with him is that he says nothing about them. He just does not mention them at all. He generally emphasizes one truth about God only, and that is love. He does not mention the other truths that are equally prominent in the Scriptures; and that is where the danger lies.” Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
Leon Morris
“The love of God is a love for the completely undeserving. Using a variety of words and images, the many authors of the Bible emphasize this truth. . . . That love means the cross, for God will do whatever is needed – even make a supreme sacrifice – to save the sinners he loves. . . . God’s love is not simply a beautiful but detached emotion – it is a love that pays the price. The cross is the measure of this love.” Testaments of Love
Keeping the Ten Commandmentsby Packer, J. I. (Author)
J. I. Packer
“But the love-or-law antithesis is false, just as the down-grading of law is perverse. Love and law are not opponents but allies, forming together the axis of true morality. Law needs love as its drive, else we get the Pharisaism that puts principles before people and says one can be perfectly good without actually loving one’s neighbor. The truest and kindest way to see situationism is as a reaction against real or imaginary Pharisaism. Even so it is a jump from the frying pan into the fire, inasmuch as correctness, however cold, does less damage than lawlessness, however well-meant. And love needs law as its eyes, for love (Christian agape as well as sexual eros) is blind. To want to love someone Christianly does not of itself tell you how to do it. Only as we observe the limits set by God’s law can we really do people good.” Keeping the Ten Commandments
Becky Pippert
“In Christianity God is both a God of love and of justice. Many people struggle with this. They believe that a loving God can’t be a judging God. Like most other Christian ministers in our society, I have been asked literally thousands of times, ‘How can a God of love be also a God filled with wrath and anger? If he is loving and perfect, he should forgive and accept everyone. He shouldn’t get angry.’ I always start my response by pointing out that all loving persons are sometimes filled with wrath, not just despite, but because of, their love. If you love a person and see someone ruining them — even they themselves — you get angry.” Hope Has Its Reasons
Francis Schaeffer
“And the purpose of our creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.” True Spirituality
John Stott
“The fellowship of the local Church is created by truth and exhibited in love. Each qualifies the other. Our love is not to be so blind as to ignore the views and conduct of others. Truth should make our love discriminating. John sees nothing inconsistent in adding to his command to love one another (5) a clear instruction about the refusal of fellowship to false teachers, who are deceivers and antichrists (7-11). Our love for others is not to undermine our loyalty to the truth. On the other hand, we must never champion the truth in a harsh or bitter spirit. Those who are ‘walking in truth’ (4) need to be exhorted to ‘love one another’ (5). So the Christian fellowship should be marked equally by love and truth, and we are to avoid the dangerous tendency to extremism, pursuing either at the expense of the other. Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love. We need to live according to Scripture which commands us both to love each other in the truth and to hold the truth in love.” The Epistles of John
A. W. Tozer
“To love is also to hate. The heart that is drawn to righteousness will be repulsed by iniquity in the same degree. The holiest man is the one who loves righteousness most and hates evil with the most perfect hatred.” God Tells the Man Who Cares
Dallas Willard
“What exactly is love? It is will-to-good or benevolence. We love something or someone when we promote their good for their own sake. Love’s contrary is malice, and its simple absence is indifference.” Renovation of the Heart
